Understanding pro-environmental intentions through growth, competitiveness, and concern Anastasia E. Thyroff a , William E. Kilbourne b, * a Clemson University, 249 Sirrine Hall, Clemson, SC 29631 b Clemson University, 355-D Sirrine Hall, Clemson, SC 29631 ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 24 February 2017 Revised 18 April 2017 Accepted 28 April 2017 Available online Keywords: Environmental intentions Sustainability Individual competitiveness Economic growth A B ST R AC T The effects of market liberalization and the social institutions contained within are increasingly neces- sary to understand. The purpose of this paper is to expand this understanding by examining neoliberal institutional variables (i.e., belief in economic growth and individual competitiveness) on pro- environmental behavior. To study this, we use two countries: one that has recently experienced high economic growth (China) and one that has recently experienced low economic growth (Japan), as a mod- erator variable. Further, environmental concern is proposed to mediate the moderation. The proposed conditional mediation is supported. Findings suggest that citizens with a desire for additional econom- ic growth, in countries with large historical growth, have high environmental concern. Further, citizens with high individual competitiveness, in low historical growth countries, have low environmental concern. However, citizens with high environmental concern have high environmental intentions, regardless of current country growth. Implications for management and sustainability are then given. © 2017 Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Marketers are increasingly interested in sustainability and cor- porate responsibility due to the environmental consequences of consumption on a global scale (Beckmann, 2007; Brennan et al., 2011; Cho et al., 2013; McDonagh and Prothero, 2014; Tan et al., 2016). Humans are reliant on natural resources (e.g., water, energy, materials, land) to consume. In 1998, it was predicted that it would take two additional planets the size of earth to produce the natural resources needed if all of the people on the planet lived in a high consumption or neoliberal country (Wackernagel and Rees, 1998). At the time, North America – specifically the United States – was the largest consumer of world energy at 95.02 quadrillion BTU (British thermal unit) a year. However, other regions of the world have taken the deep plunge into high consumption, and Wackernagel and Rees’s (1998) prediction is much more of a reality. For instance, although North America has historically been the largest consumer of energy, it has only seen a 2.53% increase in energy consumption from 1998 to 2012. However, other regions of the world have seen dramatic percentage increases (e.g., see Fig. 1). Central and South America have, for example, seen a 42.42% in- crease, Africa has seen a 53.36% increase, the Middle East has seen a 97.87% increase, and Asia has seen a 105.25% increase. Out of the 214 countries for which data exist, China showed the largest energy consumption change from 1998 to 2012 with of 74.13 quadrillion BTU increase and Japan showed the smallest consumption change of -1.14 quadrillion BTU (EIA, 2012). Due to increased consumption of our natural resources, more people are starting to accept the inevitability of global climate change. For instance, England recently released a “UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA)” that gives a detailed look at the impacts of climate change and 100 potential risks (e.g., massive floods and killer heat-waves). The CCRA also gives advice to companies and individuals on how to best prepare for climate change (Truss, 2013). However, from environmental psychology and marketing perspec- tives, we must ask ourselves whether anything can still be done to slow down consumption and increase pro-environmental behav- ioral intentions to prevent the devastating consequences of consumption on the environment – is there a way to shift the con- sumption paradigm? To better understand this issue, we examine citizens’ ways of looking at the world, or their Dominant Social Paradigms (DSP) (Pirages and Ehrlich, 1974), and the DSP’s impact on pro- environmental behavioral intentions, particularly in Asia where increases in energy usage is now greatest. Specifically, we examine the DSP variables, belief in economic growth and individual com- petitiveness, in two Asian societies: China and Japan. Asia was chosen because of the dramatic energy consumption increase there in the past 20 years. China and Japan were selected because of the dra- matic differences in their actual historical growth rates as reflected in their relative increases in energy consumption. * Corresponding author. Fax: +864 656 0138. E-mail address: Kilbour@clemson.edu (W.E. Kilbourne). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ausmj.2017.04.005 1441-3582/© 2017 Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Australasian Marketing Journal ■■ (2017) ■■–■■ ARTICLE IN PRESS Please cite this article in press as: Anastasia E. Thyroff, William E. Kilbourne, Understanding pro-environmental intentions through growth, competitiveness, and concern, Austral- asian Marketing Journal (2017), doi: 10.1016/j.ausmj.2017.04.005 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Australasian Marketing Journal journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/amj